• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, April 11, 2007

Weeks after announcing a partnership to sell TV advertising time for direct satellite TV distributor EchoStar, Google is rumored to have struck a similar deal with the other major satellite TV player, DirecTV.

"VentureBeat is hearing that Google is negotiating an advertising deal with DirecTV, the nation's largest satellite broadcast service with 16 million subscribers," Thor Muller, a blogger with Silicon Valley venture capital newsletter VentureBeat posted this morning, sparking following up reports in financial dailies and industry trade publications.

"The DirecTV deal is taking more time than Dish's to close because DirecTV is managing the ownership change announced last year (when News Corp said it would sell its ownership stake to Liberty)," reported VentureBeat, citing an unnamed source.

News Corp.'s shareholders recently approved a plan that would give John Malone's Liberty Media Corp. control of DirecTV.

A Google deal with DirecTV would be significant, because coupled with EchoStar's footprint, it would give Google's advertisers reach into more than 25% of U.S. TV households, and would send a signal that Google is a real player in the TV advertising business. Others have tried to forge TV advertising alliances between EchoStar and DirecTV in the past on the premise that it would create a unified satellite TV powerhouse bigger than even the largest cable TV operation, Comcast Corp.

Google's deals with satellite TV operators also raise important implications for interactive advertisers, because unlike most broadcast and cable TV operators, EchoStar and DirecTV have national interactive TV advertising capabilities in place and are actively working with advertisers to deploy them including major automotive and financial marketers.